Chrome Steed

Four mana buys a 2/2 that swells to a 4/4 the instant your board carries three artifacts: a steep price to pay for a body that does nothing without the right shell around it, and that steepness defines the metalcraft template it belongs to. Metalcraft puts a hard threshold under a payoff. Clear the count and the creature is a respectable beater; fall short and you have wildly overpaid for vanilla stats. This is the common-rarity expression of that bargain, handed to a low-curve artifact aggro shell as a body that scales with the same board state the rest of the deck is already trying to assemble. Because it is itself an artifact, it counts toward its own threshold, which sands down the cliff a little: only two other artifacts need to be in play before it flips on. There is no evasion, no protection, no resilience built in; the design asks nothing of the pilot beyond keeping artifacts on the table, and pays out nothing for anything else. It sits in the broad family of threshold creatures whose stat line lives in two discrete states, swinging on a condition rather than ramping incrementally, and it occupies the floor of that category: a plain, conditional beater for a metalcraft deck, honest about both its ceiling and the cost of getting there.